Thursday, September 16, 2010

Big change in the Magic: The Gathering metagame

I don't often write a lot about Magic: The Gathering but I had a thought that I can't express in 140 characters.

Has there ever been such a huge change in a metagame as we are seeing in both extended and standard right now?

The reasons for Extended are easy, wizards have changed what Extended means so this is clear to everyone, but I'm not sure if people have considered how standard is about to change.

Historically when we had a rotation the new set was too small to have any big synergy and people were also just getting used to the previous block. Additionally the core set used to stick around a lot longer.

This time everything is different. We have a set with a (seemingly) very high amount of good cards. The core set is rotating with M10 rotating out. All the tier 1 (with the possible exception of turbo-land) losing everything, from sovereigns to bloodbraid elves. And with RoE being a somewhat stand alone set, the Zendikar block is not significantly bigger to dominate the card synergies available.

There is a fairly large local standard tournament (BC Provincial championships) on the 9th of October, which is very close to the rotation. While the pros will be writing articles and throwing decks out there (often - as usual - not the decks they really think are good, those they keep for tournaments as it should be) there won't be any concrete decks with results.

This is going to be fun. At least if I can drag myself away from Starcraft 2 enough to brew some MTG goodness.